Beth Mead had just got off the phone to Phil Neville. It was 2019 and her place at the World Cup was in doubt. The gist of their talk, Neville later recalled, went something like this: “Do you want to go to Blackpool on your holidays or do you want to go to the moon? Before, she was happy to go to Whitley Bay and have fish and chips.”
The Arsenal forward still managed to enjoy her trip to the seaside on Monday night, taking home the match-ball after her hat-trick against Norway. Mead insists she “hasn’t even thought about” the Golden Boot, but she now leads the race with four goals from England’s opening two games.
Neville is not the only coach who will want to take a little of the credit. Her boss at Arsenal, Jonas Eidevall, admits she “blew my mind” when he first arrived, winning WSL Player of the Month in his first few weeks in charge – but he has also worked on her role in an evolving Gunners attack. “I hope wide forwards are watching this on TV,” he said, after watching her display at The Amex. “This is what you need to do to score goals.”
It wasn’t always this way, of course. Neville had singled her out for some “harsh words”, admitting he gave her a “massive rocket” when he dropped her at the SheBelieves Cup. Then, she came close to being discarded by interim boss Hege Riise when Neville resigned.
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“The player report hasn’t been that great,” Riise explained, offering a non-committal “we’ll see”, when asked if Mead’s performances for Arsenal could see her force her way back into contention.
She was left out of Riise’s first squad and substituted in the subsequent 3-1 defeat to France. When England followed that up with an uninspiring 2-0 defeat to Canada, she sat as an unused substitute even as her team-mates struggled for a breakthrough.
Even Rachel Daly (now used by Wiegman as a left-back) was ahead of Mead in the pecking order on the right wing. At that stage, Mead had scored eight goals in 25 internationals, the best of them an extraordinary cross-turned shot from the outskirts of the box against Brazil.
She wasn’t the only one who was sidelined. Nikita Parris was also out on the fringes of this England side, but that was largely due to her being in France before her return to English football with Arsenal, as Covid protocols made travel back and forth complicated.
Ultimately, Mead made it into that World Cup squad. More travails followed, the low point being her exile from the Team GB squad at the Olympics, which she says led to her “playing angry”. But it has to be said that she is not the only one whose progress has been disrupted by playing under three different managers in a year – five if you include Joe Montemurro and Eidevall at Arsenal.
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The 27-year-old’s best qualities – her aggression, her crosses and vision – have remained the same. Yet Mead acknowledges she benefited from the tough love she has received in England camps, no longer content to think “I did all right today, I played six or seven out of 10”.
After the goal-fest against Norway, there was no question of that. Asked afterwards if it felt as though she were in the form of her life, Mead responded: “Yes, it does. I’m really enjoying my football, I love being part of this team.”
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While she had given an inkling of what she might produce at this tournament with a brace against the Netherlands in a warm-up friendly, not even Sarina Wiegman can have predicted the impact she has made.
“I’m just loving being here,” Mead added. “Loving being part of this team and enjoying every minute.”
The irony is that the Wiegman era began with a defiant Mead getting on the scoresheet in an 8-0 win against North Macedonia. The mood was very different when she did the same on Monday night.
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